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… read about the Tuvans dying in Putin’s war.

It is hard to know exactly how many Tuvans have been sent to fight in Ukraine. The Tuva Republic within Russia is small, remote, and lacks independent media. The most prominent governmental official from Tuva is Defense Minister of the Russian Federation Sergey Shoigu, responsible for executing President Vladimir Putin’s war. Eres Kara-sal is a former member of the Tuvan legislature who fled Russia after declaring: “There is not one square meter of land that’s worth human lives.” Kara Sal told Vladimir Sevrinovsky of Meduza [[link removed]] that by his estimation, “from two to 4.5 thousand Tuvans were sent to Ukraine — between 0.6 and 1.4% of the population of the republic. Around 600 people have returned home.” In the poor republic of a few hundred thousand, the fact of deaths on the front is inescapable. While other provinces have lost more people, no population within Russia has likely suffered as disproportionately as Tuva, where the Russian Army has been the main option for young men looking to escape poverty. In Sevrinovsky’s reporting, the costs of war are felt in the population as independent activists try to track down the dead. In the meantime, Shamans and Buddhist leaders offer what spiritual armor they can to the young men sent to die.

Bugging Out

In the last tense decade of the Cold War, the United States turned its technical know-how to covering Soviet embassies with a staggering array of listening devices. The Brush Pass author Zach Dorfman [[link removed]] recently obtained a set of declassified 1980s intelligence files from Poland. These files illustrate the thorough attempt by the United States to listen in on Soviet conversations taking place on US soil, even if those conversations took place in embassies, apartments, or cars.

“And the bugs were everywhere: encased in plaster in an apartment closet; behind electrical and television outlets; bored into concrete bricks and threaded into window frames; inside wooden beams and baseboards and stashed within a building’s foundation itself; surreptitiously attached to security cameras; wired into ceiling panels and walls; and secretly implanted into the backseat of cars and in their window panels, instrument panels, and dashboards,” writes Dorfman.

The collection also speaks to the limits of the technology at the time. While impressive for the era, finite battery life, large form factor, and limited ability to transmit data collected meant they often required physical retrieval. Nevertheless, it’s a deep dive into a past era of espionage.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Digging in

The archives of a colonial administration are a limited window onto the past. The people tasked with tracking exports and imports, for taxes and tariffs and national prestige, are not by design going to capture the whole picture of a country and the labor done within it. But, as Morten Jerven explores in “The Wealth and Poverty of African States,” those records can build on postcolonial data, to offer a longer-term perspective on the continuous growth of economies in Africa.

“Perhaps the weakest element of the book is that its time series begins in the 1890s, roughly the decade in which Britain and France consolidated their control over the continent,” writes Alden Young, reviewing Jerven for Phenomenal World [[link removed]]. “This allows Jerven to emphasize what he sees as a weak relationship between domestic policy and economic growth.”

Nevertheless, the work offers a useful corrective to accounts that see present African poverty as an intrinsic fact of the continent rather than a series of choices made by states, colonial and otherwise, all while existing in a shared international system. Suppose economic growth isn’t just a modern phenomenon but a durable trend. In that case, the question becomes what policy choices can shift the present narrow accumulation of wealth by elites into broader prosperity that ends poverty. It’s a question with implications far beyond the continent.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Italian job: Part I

The Italian Constitution was adopted in 1947, years after the overthrow of Mussolini’s fascist state at the hands of liberating allies and Italian anti-fascist partisans. Enshrined in that constitution, and enforced in the decades since, is a principle of judicial prosecution. Because all cases were pursued, the venue where the cases are tried and charged matters a great deal, as the discretion of the prosecutor manifests not in case selection but instead in sentencing and rigor of pursuit.

In “ Prosecutorial Gatekeeping and Its Effects on Criminal Accountability: The Roman Prosecutor’s Office and Corruption Investigations in Italy, 1975–1994 [[link removed]],” Lucia Manzi looks at the particular structural role of the Rome prosecutor’s office.

This office, as the jurisdiction overseeing the seat of government, was able to use gatekeeping to shield politicians from corruption charges up through 1991. Then, following a change in the judicial philosophy of the prosecutor in charge of Rome, an end to those protections cleared the path for the Mani Pulite (Clean Hands) corruption investigation, which overturned the stable coalition system of the Cold War and led to the political reality of the present.

“Due to its geographical location at the heart of the country's capital, where all government institutions and political parties' headquarters reside, the Roman prosecutor's office could potentially claim jurisdiction over most, if not all, criminal violations committed by elected officials and political personalities,” writes Manzi.

The Italian judiciary is structurally independent and responsible for the appointment and advancement of its members. After the 1970s, this was by seniority, but prior to that, it hinged on evaluation by superiors, encouraging ideological homogeneity among the profession.

Confounding the hopes of those who would want to prosecute corruption was a long-standing belief among the conservative elite of the Italian legal establishment that shielded government officials from the investigation, starting with a refusal to hold fascist officials accountable under laws punishing “particularly cruel barbarity” passed after the overthrow of fascism.

This meant, Manzi writes, “the use of gatekeeping powers to shield state agents from accountability followed a much broader logic, rooted in Italian legal positivism's traditional hostility toward the use of investigative powers against the state.”

Manzi details two prosecutions of corruption scandals by the Milan office. A 1981 look into corruption by the Italian Socialist Party, a regular feature of Italy’s governing coalitions, unearthed deeper webs of connections and Swiss bank accounts for payouts. But, looking to shield the state from accountability, the Rome prosecutor's office claimed jurisdiction, blocked the Milan team from requesting Swiss records, and steered the investigation from above.

In 1992, the Milan team pursued a similar set of leads under a different Roman prosecutor. Without interference from Rome, their corruption investigation was allowed to proceed, kicking off the start of a sweeping investigation that found all parties of Italy’s stagnant governing coalition entwined with bribery for contracts and other kinds of corruption.

Manzi concludes that the “preferences of the prosecutorial actors in charge of gatekeeping institutions may have massive implications for the quality of democracy and the rule of law.”

LEARN MORE [[link removed]]

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS

Manuel Rueda observed [[link removed]] young men learning how to change diapers on a baby doll. The work was done as part of a Care School for Men in Bogotá. The program is part of a broader outreach effort to get men to shoulder more of the domestic tasks, which presently fall to an average of 3 hours more work a day for women than men. This outreach also includes community laundromats, daycare centers, and classes for low-income women to ease the burdens of parenting and chores and expand their possibilities. It will also, it is hoped, free up the space for young men to actively participate in fatherhood.

Brooke Bowser, Fen-Chi Hsu, Christopher Elvidge, and Morgan Bazilian mapped [[link removed]] the view from the night sky above Ukraine during the war so far. Comparing satellite footage across the first months of the war, the research team from the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines revealed patterns of activity, illuminated by the use of lights at night, across the country and the fronts inside it. The photos map the war in a way distinct from the painted-in vocabulary of military advances and offer insight into patterns of life during wartime.

Orla Barry interviewed [[link removed]] Szandi Minzari, a broadcaster on Radio Dikh in Budapest. The station’s presenters are all Roma, an ethnic group that has been the target of specific structural harms in Hungary. “We like to cover topics that usually don’t get talked about around the kitchen table,” Minzari told Barry. With her co-host Melanie Nagy, the two talk about relationships, divorce, menstruation, and family issues, from a Roma perspective but are open to all listeners. The show, Minzari said, steers clear of politics. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has defended school segregation of Roma while making the country so authoritarian that this month the European Parliament declared that Hungary is no longer a democracy.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] WELL PLAYED

What is to be done about the Washington offense [[link removed]]?

Within the tax code exists trace evidence of tragedy [[link removed]] and reaction to it.

There is no mod but modernism [[link removed]].

There’s systems thinking [[link removed]] and then there’s systems [[link removed]], thinking [[link removed]].

Correlations do not equal policy results [[link removed]] but don’t tell the Blob that.

The authoritarian’s cookbook is awful [[link removed]].

Chungus of Arabia [[link removed]].

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Critical State is written by Kelsey D. Atherton with Inkstick Media.

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX and GBH.

With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”

Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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